In a typical cable/MSO network, the ad splicer plays a significant role due to its ability to splice the advertisements or commercials into the live video streams using analog or Digital Program Insertion (DPI). More specifically, an ad server typically stores the commercial content and streams it to the ad splicer when triggered by digital cues. Using digital ad insertion standard such as DVS 253 (which supports the cable based DPI cueing message) or SCTE35, the ad splicer is configured to splice the MPEG commercial video streams into the programmer's digital streams. The ad splicer also allows the operator to select among multiple programmer video streams, providing outgoing signal carriage of only those networks carried by the operator.
A single market may typically have as many as 40 different advertisement zones which may be demographically grouped areas of a market that receive the same advertising content. A single hub in the network may be configured to serve multiple advertisement zones. Since each ad splicer serves a single advertisement zone, a hub with multiple advertisement zones includes a set of ad splicers for each advertisement zone.
Video and content service providers have relied upon the ad splicer capability to insert the appropriate advertisements or commercials into the live video streams as a substantial revenue source. Thus, ad splicer failure or downtime has significant impact both in real time transmission service disruption as well as loss of potential revenue from advertisements or commercials which do not get transmitted. Indeed, the undesirable mean time to repair such ad splicer failure can range from a few minutes to several hours.
Present approaches to address ad splicer failure include human intervention where a technician is dispatched to the HUB site to physically move the links from the failed ad splicer to a redundant ad splicer in the HUB site.
In view of the foregoing, it would be desirable to have methods and systems to improve the overall mean time to repair (MTTR) network downtime due to ad splicer failure.